Florida elected officials have received harrowing threats, prompting a move to shield their home addresses well before the weekend assassination of a state representative, the killing of her husband, and the shooting of a state senator and his wife over the weekend in Minnesota.
The threats received by Florida’s members of Congress, state lawmakers and local elected officials — and family members — are often kept under wraps. But state legislators said they’re more common than people realize.
“We get a lot of threats that we don’t announce to the public,” state Sen. Jason Pizzo said at a hearing earlier this year. “We don’t want to scare the public,” he said, adding that some lawmakers “get death threats all the time.”
State Sen. Barbara Sharief, a Broward Democrat, disclosed chilling examples during the hearing about a measure that would exempt certain personal information about elected officials from public disclosure under the state’s open records law.
As the mayor of Broward County when a shooter killed five people and wounded six at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in 2017, Sharief was the face of county government, which owns and operates the airport.
Sharief, who was the county’s first Black female mayor, said her home address was posted on a website affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. What followed: Months of security protection because of the threat “to come and kill me and my family.”
The next year, she received a “white, powdery substance” in the mail. Her mail was rerouted and Sharief and her family were told not to go to their mailbox for weeks.
State Sen Shevrin Jones, D-Miami Gardens, said in a telephone interview Monday that what happened in Minnesota shows why Florida law should be changed. “People don’t run for office to be intimidated. People don’t get into office for their families to be terrorized or hurt or harmed.”
Legislation
Lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the Jones-sponsored Senate Bill 268 during this year’s legislative session to seal certain information about elected officials and their family members.
It would exempt from disclosure personal identification — partial home addresses and telephone numbers — of the elected officials, their spouses and adult children and the names, home addresses, telephone numbers, and dates of birth of their minor children and the names and locations of the schools or day care facilities they attend.
It would apply to members of Congress, statewide elected officials, state senators and representatives, mayors, city or county commissioners, school board members, property appraisers and supervisors of elections.
Legislative leaders have leeway about when they present bills to the governor for action. Final passage was on April 29, and as of Monday the Legislature’s websites show the measure hasn’t yet been sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis.
It passed the Senate 34-2 and the House 113-2. If signed into law, it would take effect July 1.
Related Articles
The proposal passed over objections from the First Amendment Foundation, the Florida nonprofit dedicated to “defending your right to speak, fighting for your right to hear, and protecting your right to know.” One of its central missions is “government transparency and access to public records as protected by the Florida Constitution.”
The foundation’s website described the legislation as “a major blow to accountability and a dangerous precedent in a time when transparency is already under siege. While the bill will do little to deter bad actors, it makes it extremely difficult for people to check whether their elected officials actually live in their districts.”
Common Cause of Florida also opposed the legislation.
Bobby Block, the First Amendment Foundation’s executive director, was hammered by lawmakers from both parties when he appeared before the Senate Community Affairs Committee.
“The exemption is based solely on what the bill says is a hypothetical potential for abuse rather than concrete data. Furthermore, existing laws already provide protection against harassment, doxing, and stalking, raising a question over the need for the exemption,” he said.
And, Block said, it wouldn’t have the desired effect since “much of the information it seeks to shield is readily available through private sources and services, and it can be pieced together from public records outside state control.”
Public records reviews by citizens, reporters and political activists have found multiple cases of lawmakers not living where they claim, sometimes outside of the districts they’re elected to represent. Block said those efforts would be hindered.
The legislation would redact the house number and street address of the elected official. Jones said there would still be enough basic information available — a public official’s city and Zip code — to assure concerned residents that their representatives live in their districts.
Jones said the place for public business is in government offices and public meetings, not people showing up at officials’ homes.
“I will sign on the dotted line every single time as far as governmental transparency that I live in my district and everything else. That’s not the argument here,” Jones said. “The argument we’re talking about is (that) good people are not running for office because they fear that they and their families could be found in precarious situations.”
Pizzo also said during the committee consideration there are plenty of opportunities for people to find public officials at official settings. “We’re really easy to find. Our constituents, our voters, the public should be able to locate us. Do you really need to locate my kids?” (Block responded “no” to that question.)
Information about Pizzo, a former Democrat and now no-party-affiliation lawmaker who represents eastern Broward, is already exempt from disclosure because he is a former criminal prosecutor.
Sharief said there is more than enough reason to shield the information from “from these people who are quite frankly lunatics.”
Other examples
Sharief’s experience isn’t unique.
“These things are real,” said U.S. Rep Randy Fine, R-Melbourne Beach. He said two people “have been arrested, prosecuted, and sent to jail for making death threats against my family.”
In one case, he said, the threats “were not against me. They were against my children. The person who made it said he was going to come and eat them,” Fine said. “These things are real.”
One of his last actions as a state senator before he won an April special election to fill a U.S. House vacancy, was voting in a committee to advance the Jones-sponsored legislation.
In December 2023, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., revealed that his Naples home had been swatted. Scott and his wife weren’t home at the time of what he later called “a sick attempt to terrorize my family.”
Swatting involves making a false emergency call, often reporting a shooting or a hostage taking, with the aim of generating an armed police response, possibly including a SWAT team, to a home. The victim doesn’t know what’s going on, including why police arrive with guns drawn.
Last year, U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Parkland, said his name was on the target list of a Margate man, who was in possession of weapons and ammunition.
“The individual in question was arrested not far from my home; he is a former felon who was in possession of a rifle, a suppressor, and body armor,” Moskowitz said in a statement. “Found with him was a manifesto that, among other things, included antisemitic rhetoric and only my name on the ‘target’ list.”
In April the man pleaded guilty to four felony charges and is scheduled for sentencing in July.
Jones, who grew up in Broward and held his first elected office in the county, was the first openly LGBTQ member of the Florida Senate.
He delivered an emotional speech in 2022 in the Senate about the impact of the “Parental Rights in Education Bill,” widely referred to as “Don’t Say Gay,” as the measure was on its way to becoming law.
Video of the speech went viral — and Jones said death threats followed.
“It was probably the scariest few weeks of my life because I had to have security at church with me, security at the Pride parade with me,” Jones said. Authorities checked on his parents to make sure they were safe.
“I knew what this was, getting myself into being the first of anything,” Jones said. “No one opens themself up to the type of public scrutiny where you fear for your life. No one should. I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Everyone wants to get home to their families.”
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.